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Faceless She-wolf

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I just recently got back from my first trip to Germany after visiting Berlin and it's completely changed me. I feel very very inspired to learn German, I loved the language and I'm genuinely considering the possibility to move there someday  :wideeyed:

 

I'm 20 so I think I'm apparently still in that age where your brain doesn't struggle as much to learn languages?

 

I was just wondering if anyone has any tips on learning a language, do you practice all of the time? Take online courses? Go to classes?

 

Also, it would be handy if anyone knows of any free online courses for learning German please? :D

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Have fun.  I learned German in high school, although I have lost most of it from lack of practice.  I was surprisingly able to pick it back up when we visited Vienna.  As a language, it helped me to see that English is a mix of Saxon/German/Danish and French/Latin, explaining the disparity in word roots.

 

My wife started learning French as a hobby.  She tried Rosetta Stone and got nowhere with it.  Very expensive, very time consuming, very slow progress.  After she spent three months on that system, I picked up more French than her in 30 minutes with a phrase book as we flew into Paris.  But then she started taking a weekly class, with homework assignments to be done between classes, and has made much more progress.  Class is to practice speaking and listening to French, assignments are to reinforce the new vocabulary and grammar in writing so it sticks in your memory.  She found some news podcasts that are broadcast in a slow French speech and she finds that to be much more helpful than listening to the French TV channel at normal speed.

 

Daily practice is needed until you build pretty good familiarity and occasionally find yourself thinking in the new language.

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Adjectival endings were the bane of my existence (bloody gendered language!).

 

The trick here is lots of reading and lots of listening (find yourself German language stuff on Youtube). Don't even think about writing or speaking it - just get as much German into your system as possible. Don't obsess about memorising vast vocab lists either, beyond basics. Once you learn a word, and see its context, and read it in context (hence reading), you'll be fine.

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You might try Duolingo and/or Livemocha as online resources. There's really no substitute for classes, though.

I was learning French and Memrise for remembering some basic or common verbs or prepositions and such might help. Having all that in a single place with the ability to quantify your progress might help. But it does get a bit much for larger sets of words with less context and differentiation. Pick your course (or the parts of courses you study) wisely I guess

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I moved to Germany 6 years ago to live with my wife, then girlfriend. Germany is a great place to live.

Re: learning the language: there is no one size fits all approach to it. You have to do a bit of everything. Watch children's shows/cartoons, read (even if you don't understand it), listen to songs, and most importantly you have to speak it on a regular basis. This is hugely important. Find a penpal who'll be willing to Skype or whatever/move back over and attend classes over there.

German is a difficult language, but it's not impossible. Don't get to bogged down with the grammar. Learn vocabulary. Perfect grammar will come with practise. My careers advisor told me to just concentrate on the vocabulary to begin with, basic grammatical structures comes naturally.

A few resources I use/used:

Deutsche Welle - warum nicht? (This is a podcast - free). They also have a free online course which takes you from A1-B2 of the European framework. There's an entire section dedicated to deutsch Lernen.

Memrise.

Michelle Thomas courses. I didn't use all his courses, just the couple of beginners ones. Was good.

Newspapers.

Radio stations. Free to air online. Good to get to grips with how the language sounds.

Andre Klein has good books for learners. Well worth checking out.
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As somebody who is getting back to German language lessons after a year off: 

 

Learn those friggin articles! Or you will regret it :P It's the reason for the conjugations. Even the adjectives are conjugated based on the gender of the noun. SIGH. 

 

Because we speak English in my study programme, my German has been quite slow. (Been here 2.5 years).  I understand basic stuff - I am currently A2 - but I really feel nervous when making straight sentences beyond asking for directions, can I have that bread, and 2 beers please. I really really want to be more confident. Recently I have been using duolingo - it's  a good refresher course. However, I find it too repetitive and basic sometimes and the grammatik can be lacking. But for every day vocabulary, duolingo helps them stick in my head. 

 

I am starting B1 next week.  Wish me luck!

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I just recently got back from my first trip to Germany after visiting Berlin and it's completely changed me. I feel very very inspired to learn German, I loved the language and I'm genuinely considering the possibility to move there someday  :wideeyed:

 

I'm 20 so I think I'm apparently still in that age where your brain doesn't struggle as much to learn languages?

 

I was just wondering if anyone has any tips on learning a language, do you practice all of the time? Take online courses? Go to classes?

 

Also, it would be handy if anyone knows of any free online courses for learning German please? :D

 

Watch media in German, buy childrens books. Watch German films.

 

And I guess I could teach you some. Via Skype, for example.

 

There's some language courses in book format.

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Watch media in German, buy childrens books. Watch German films.

 

Yep. If it's in German, it's good. 

 

(Speaking as someone who has Finnish as a hobby: I've got hold of the Finnish translation of a book I'm intimately familiar with - The Lord of the Rings - and am working through it for reading practice).

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Yep. If it's in German, it's good. 

 

(Speaking as someone who has Finnish as a hobby: I've got hold of the Finnish translation of a book I'm intimately familiar with - The Lord of the Rings - and am working through it for reading practice).

 

Well, I teach English with English children's books in fact. Because it's simple English. And going from a "simple" to a "complex" language is best.

 

EDIth: one of my pupils was astonished when I got "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" from my satchel. :rofl:

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You probably need some lessons for a start before you can use children's books or internet ressources. There are probably quite a few German speaking students in the UK; often universities/colleges have "matching services" that connect language learners for conversation (or match native speakers with learners etc.) But for this you also better need some basics.

 

German is native language to almost 100 Million speakers, so there are lots of movies, books, internet stuff in German.

 

It's always hard to tell about one's native language but apparently among the most difficult things for many learners are the articles and the declensions of articles, adjectives and substantives. The good thing here is that you will usually be understood in spite of messing them up. So if you ask "Wo ist die [recte: der] Bahnhof?" or sth. like that people will understand you.

The verbs are not harder than in English, I guess, overall tenses/aspects are rather primitive in German, especially in everyday speech. As has been said already, the languages do share some vocabulary although German lacks the strong early Latin/French influence and is notorious for many native "big words", that is, many abstracta etc. are built from genuine German roots, not simply taken over from Latin or French. (Or sometimes, as in English, both exist.)

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I loved German. Studied it for 5 years in School but have now forgotten everything lmao. School was 5 years ago now tho. :P I was thinking of trying to learn it again too but I am so scarred by learning Ancient Greek in University and completely failing that so classes with homework sounds scary to me LOL. 

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(Speaking as someone who has Finnish as a hobby: I've got hold of the Finnish translation of a book I'm intimately familiar with - The Lord of the Rings - and am working through it for reading practice).


A friend of mine moved to Germany and I bought him the German version of A Game Of Thrones. I wonder if there's a way of setting up a Kindle so that the language is German but the word definitions are in English? That'd be handy.
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The best thing to decide right off the bat is to figure out what level of fuck-up is acceptable to you and your goals. My command of German grammar is tenuous at best, but as long as people understand me when I'm chatting with them, then I DGAF about the mistakes. It was, of course, a luxury that I could get away with that, but any jobs I had when living there were not German-language-based (I was a research scientist, and the current lingua franca for science is English).

 

I made it a point to speak German (yes, even bad German) to anyone and everyone who didn't have English as a native language. It helped me massively in the end, because I ended up with a much more varied set of friends than those people who spent their time primarily speaking English and not advancing their language skills.

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Like X-Ray, I lived in Germany and spoke German as often as I possibly could, though I mainly spoke English at work. My grammar is also horrendous, but nobody seems to mind too much. I last spoke German regularly 25 years ago, but I find it it comes straight back after about a litre of Pils. The bane of a lapsed German speaker's life is getting to the end of a possibly lengthy sentence only to find you've completely forgotten the verb needed to make sense of the whole bloody thing.

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A friend of mine moved to Germany and I bought him the German version of A Game Of Thrones. I wonder if there's a way of setting up a Kindle so that the language is German but the word definitions are in English? That'd be handy.

 

The German translation?

 

Oh, for heaven's sake.

 

Try something easier.

 

((I'm certainly no friend of the German translation of any book.))

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Like X-Ray, I lived in Germany and spoke German as often as I possibly could, though I mainly spoke English at work. My grammar is also horrendous, but nobody seems to mind too much.

Don't forget that until a few decades ago, Germany was a country with an anglophone occupation force. Otherwise, it seems many Germans (and this also holds for other countries, e.g. France), really like foreigners to make an effort, so they will not be that picky (although in general a somewhat perfectionist and nitpicking mindset used to be very common in Germany).

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Don't forget that until a few decades ago, Germany was a country with an anglophone occupation force. Otherwise, it seems many Germans (and this also holds for other countries, e.g. France), really like foreigners to make an effort, so they will not be that picky (although in general a somewhat perfectionist and nitpicking mindset used to be very common in Germany).

 

One does learn a language by using it.

 

One of my late English friends in Yorkshire said, "You know we English are just too lazy to speak a foreign language because we *know* that the others are learning our language."

 

Speak German as often as you can.

 

Conjugate German verbs.

 

Be not afraid to make mistakes.

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